How to grow your brand

Last week, Kantar came out with its 'Blueprint for Brand Growth ... and how CMOs can operationalize it'. Because brand growth remains one of the key priorities of CMOs and their C-suite colleagues, I was happy to take a look at their advice to be consistent, connected and optimized. My below summary integrates key insights from my peer-reviewed research, as always freely available at marketingandmetrics.com

Main take-away: Be meaningfully different to more people

Brand growth requires 'gaining more souls' instead of just preaching to the choir. As Byron Sharp eloquently explained in 'How Brands Grow' and follow-up studies, there is limited potential to get your existing buyers to buy more, especially of fast moving consumer goods in mature markets. Hence, reaching light and non-buyers is key. However, not all reach is the same: you do need to be relevant and give prospects a reason to buy.

This common wisdom is still true today. For instance, my last Practice Prize winner analyzed which marketing actions got the highest response from existing customers versus from prospects and dormant customers (who had not bought from L'Occitane in over a year). Across the 6 analyzed countries, existing customers only needed the cheapest and most convenient reminder, in this case through emails. In contrast, prospects and dormants only reacted to direct mail, which shows the latest company offer in a visually attractive manner. ?This was exactly the opposite what the company had been doing: sending the most expensive mail to high value customers, but emails to prospects who did not pay attention. A field experiment confirmed that the recommended switch was better for both company and customers.

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Points of parity and points of difference remains a powerful framework to ask your colleagues and customers:

1) how do we encourage consumers to seriously consider us?

2) how are we different enough to invite consumers to take a chance on us?

The first part was often overlooked in 20th century marketing text books, who jumped straight to 'competitive advantage'. As Ehrenberg and his colleagues have shown for decades, the typical consumer does not give much attention to your category - definitely not as much as you do as a marketer. Marketers often act as if they are already 'in the room' as Jenni Romaniuk calls it, and get enough consumer attention to broadcast brand uniqueness or difference. Instead, a key priority is to 'get into the room'. Widespread awareness helps to get such attention, even better when this mental availability is connected to category entry points such as 'what's for dinner tonight' or 'I feel thirsty and need a pick-me-up in the afternoon'.

?The second part is often overlooked in the 21st century, including by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Advertising is not just 'creative publicity' with the same effect independent of brand message or ad execution. Digging down to the campaign level in both practice (Amazon ads) and academia, my experience is that some ad campaigns are highly effective while others don't move the needle at all. However, advertising is a 'weak force': it can bring your audience to your brand, but it can't make them buy it. Kotler popularized the idea of the 'marketing mix', where the chef brand mixes the delicious ingredients of product, price, place and promotion. Hundreds of peer-reviewed studies show the stronger force of price, and dozens quantify the benefits of product and distribution innovation. Your value offer (product and price) does not have to be better than the competition, but it helps: a differentiated brand has more staying power, earns higher prices and better partnerships with retailers, employees, policy makers and other brands.

Growth accelerators: predispose people, be more present and find new space

1) Predispose people to grow penetration

Penetration is key to growth, but it's also hard: among the 14,623 brands from BrandZ analyzed by Kantar, 81% showed stable penetration, 8% declined and only 11% grew their penetration. Likewise, my recent paper with Oliver Koll analyzed countries as different as Germany and Indonesia, where 63% of brand fortunes were stable, 18% declining and 19% growing. Even in 'emerging markets', your brand growth is not guaranteed.

Key drivers of penetration in our paper include:

1) differentiation: doubling this is expected to increase penetration by 22%

2) brand awareness and customer satisfaction: increasing penetration by 21%

Likewise, Kantar's advice to get your brand in the hands of more customers in the market:

1) make it easy for consumers to think about and find your brand

2) go beyond supply-driven market definitions to address customer needs

"The brands showing growth tended to have higher relative difference than expected for their size, while declining brands were lacking in difference. ?But difference needs to be Meaningful and relevant. And it’s not about being unique – it is relative difference compared to competitors over time that matters."

How to build brand difference?

A brand's positioning needs to have emotive clarity and to be consistent. Explore drivers of Meaningfulness and adopt differentiation through your brand DNA (e.g. freshness in gum for Mentos) or add a new attribute that can be Meaningful and a source of difference for you (energy for Red Bull).

Just like Kantar, I do differentiate between small/young and large/established brands. In our analysis of the car industry, we found that ad message consistency if key for younger brands. Once your brand is established though, a key threat is loss of meaning and relevance. Changing your ad execution helps in this regard.

Is your brand different but not meaningful?

Kantar offers this useful 2x2 to diagnose your brand:

Brands that are Meaningful but lacking Difference (bottom right) need to find ways to stand apart. They are likely to be successfully meeting broad category needs today, but by cultivating perceived, relative difference on things that matter, could build stronger predisposition.

Brands that are different but lacking in Meaningful (top left) need to break through the ‘growth ceiling’ by broadening the scale of their appeal and avoiding becoming too niche or specialist.

What matters more: Meaningful, Different or Salient? In Kantar's research of 540 categories in 54 markets, Salience accounts fo 40% of consumers' predisposition to buy it, but Meaningfully Different for 60%. As to paying more, Meaningfully Different accounts for over 90% of the predisposition

Interestingly, Kantar recommends ensuring your brand is meaningfully different BEFORE increasing its salience:

This advice is consistent with the notion that it is hard to change people's minds once your brand is well known. Instead, establishing your meaningful difference before going big allows you to shave off the sharp edges and leverage loyal brand advocates as ambassadors for your growth. Likewise, mass media advertising such as TV can work best when the reached consumers can see evidence (online or offline) of how great your brand offer is.

However, the advice goes against the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, which would recommend increasing mental and physical availability without worrying over meaningful differences. Their rationale would be that meaningful difference is implausible to achieve and unnecessary to grow your brand. I can offer a third reason to grow your salience first: your own company may be unsure which point(s) of difference to communicate, but getting the product in the hands of consumers could organically generate their consensus. Your brand can 'go viral' and achieve a positioning you never intended.

2) Connect: build Presence

Predisposing consumers towards your brand is great, but you also need to convert them. Kantar calls this 'being present' and recommends activation power, presence (distribution, search), range, price and promotion as metrics. Plotting brands based on predisposition and activation power shows the relative strengths and weaknesses:

?In this UK example, the German auto brands have excellent 'demand power', i.e. predisposition, but not much activation power. In contrast, French and Asian brands punch above their weight in activation power. The key advice is to 'be there where the choices are being made':

Distribution is a key priority for small and medium sized brands:

?Once you have distribution, ensure to

(1) offer a wide range of choices

(2) be consistent and distinctive in your execution

(3) use price promotions to your advantage

As to the latter, Kantar's recent research confirms my 2008 paper with Rebecca Slotegraaf that small brands in particular can benefit from price promotions:

Across categories such as Bottled Juice (top row) and Toothpaste (bottom row) in the 1990s, we show that this only happens for small brands with a 'meaningful difference': while market leaders such as Gatorade and Close-Up get a stronger immediate effect of a price promotion, brands such as V8 and Rembrandt get a long-term benefit driven by promotion takers who continue to buy the brand at regular price.

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3) Innovate: Find new space

Once you get these basics right, expand and find new space:

Find the most incremental spaces (motivations, occasions, categories, services) you can stretch into. Win in these new spaces through Meaningfully Different Innovation, expanded distribution, and communications.

Examples of new space by downtrading include Amazon Prime and Netflix offering ad-supported streaming services (lower price). A great example of uptrading is Baileys Chocolat Luxe (higher price), which started from the insight that their chocolate liqueur was ‘Part booze, part cake, pure pleasure’. This insight expanded their horizon to the world of treats, and led to new ideas for flavors and products, as well as redefining how and when the core product could add pleasure to people’s lives.

While small brands grow mainly by converting category buyers, big brands have more potential in growing existing buyers and bringing new buyers into the category:

When it comes to the range of products and services on offer, 'less is more' for smaller brands, who will have a bigger impact on growth by focusing on hero products and making them more appealing or relevant to more buyers and occasions. This focus on the hero products also emerges from our research on retail media such as Amazon Ads. In contrast, Kantar advises bigger brands to change the number and type of products and services, as Adobe did:

Meaningful innovation is key to grow: my research covers that in the context of multiple industries and in recession times. Kantar reminds us that the combination of innovation with meaningful difference is a winner:

In sum: consistent, connected and innovative is the way to grow.

It's quiet now....what do you know?